Insects of the order Diptera, sometimes referred to as “true flies,” and including, for example, houseflies, horse-flies, stable flies, sand flies, and mosquitoes, are often significant disease vectors, nuisances, and pests. Similarly, insects of the order Hymenoptera, which include flying insects such as sawflies, social wasps, and bees, can also be significant nuisances and pests. Many wasps, for example, have painful venous stingers. However, some flies (such as tachina flies, robber flies, and hover flies), wasps, and bees also provide benefits in certain circumstances. For example, certain wasps and flies prey on or parasitize agricultural pests, and are therefore increasingly being used for agricultural pest control as beneficial insects.
For example, the housefly, Musca domestica L. (Diptera: Muscidae), is one of the most important hygiene pests worldwide. The flies not only are a nuisance, irritating people and animals and leaving regurgitation and faecal spots on surfaces, but they are also vectors of pathogens that may cause serious diseases in humans and animals. Therefore, a lot of effort has been directed to combating this problem. Due to their reproductive rate, houseflies have developed resistance against various commonly used insecticides. Even insecticides that are effective against houseflies are not a viable option to many persons who have concerns regarding personal health effects, environmental effects, and the like. Certain semiochemical-baited traps may be very efficient at catching flies, but are typically restricted to outdoor use due to their olfactory properties, such as offensive odors.
Like many other insects, flies and wasps are well adapted for sensing visual aspects of their environment. Typically, flies and wasps have both a large pair of compound eyes and one or more “simple eyes,” or ocelli. Visual signals play a critical role in insect mating, food-finding, and defense, among any other functions.
As noted above, many insect species are beneficial. Certain wasps play an important role in natural or biological control due to their propensity to prey on or parasitize various insect pests. Other beneficial insects include the spined soldier bugs among other true bugs (Suborder: Heteroptera), lacewings and ant linons (Order: Neuroptea), and dragonflies (Order: Odonata). Many species of insects are beneficial pollinators (e.g., bees, honeybees, solitary bees, and bumblebees (Order: Hymenoptera). Many of these beneficial insects also have well-developed vision. It would be advantageous to attract beneficial insects to desired areas, for example to gardens or agricultural fields, via either olfactory or visual signal, or both.
Fly paper for entrapping flies and other flying insects are known in the art. For example, prior art fly paper rolls for hanging in rooms from a ceiling are known. Fly paper strips are typically formed as long, narrow, flexible substrates covered with a nonpoisonous sticky coating, and are usually brown in color. A fly landing on the sticky substance becomes entrapped, unable to detach from the fly paper strip.
Hanging strips of conventional fly paper from a ceiling is inconvenient. Such fly paper strips have a length of approximately one meter. Therefore, ceilings must be relatively high in order to accommodate the fly paper strips without interfering with normal occupancy of the room. It can be difficult to install fly tape strips on a ceiling, requiring using a ladder or other elevating device. It will also be appreciated that flies may not spend much time flying near the ceiling because food sources are typically closer to the ground. Therefore, a large portion of the deployed fly tape may be disposed in a region that is sparsely populated with flies.
Conventional fly tape packages are designed such that the fly tape strip is substantially removed from its container either before or during hanging. Therefore, the user hanging the tape may end up with the sticky substance on his or her hands during the deployment of the fly tape.
The effectiveness of any entrapment device such as fly tape depends on the target insects physically engaging the entrapment device. Attracting flies to the fly tape will clearly improve its effectiveness. Prior art fly tape also does not take advantage of the natural visual development of the housefly. Common houseflies have well-developed compound eyes, and vision is an important sense in this species. Adult flies are known to be phototactic, i.e., they are attracted towards light. The photoreceptors in the compound eyes are sensitive to ultraviolet and blue-green light.
Despite many experimental trials of different visual attractants, there remains a great deal of uncertainly about which combinations of color and patterns are most effective at luring common houseflies. Several novel, non-toxic, non-chemical methods and devices that use the innate optical characteristics of a target insect to attract and trap the insects are herein disclosed. For example, a visual attractant in accordance with the present invention may be used to lure pestiferous insects towards sticky traps, such as strips or sticks, and/or away from human populations or crops. A particular embodiment is disclosed with a novel dispenser/cartridge for the sticky fly tape, and/or having a visual attractant disposed on the fly tape. Similarly, a visual attractant may be used to lure beneficial insects toward a desired area, for example, to a garden or planted field as an enhanced biological and natural control tactic.
In some embodiments, the natural social and/or predatory nature of target insects are also exploited to attract the target insects by providing a substrate with visual features that simulate insects, for example, images, silhouettes, or caricatures of the target insect or of prey of the target insect.